Hi there! This might be a little bit of a read, so if you are willing to help then thank you for taking your time to get through this description. I'd hone it down a bit but I don't know how to do that without losing information that might be vital to a solution.

I have two accounts on Adium, one at xmpp-hosting.de and the other on jabb3r.de servers.

Both are consistently not connecting through Adium and when I try on Windows Pidgen there is also a really, really long wait and often the same kinds of problem. When I open the preferences pane to see how the connection is coming along for either account, underneath each account is shown a percentage and a corresponding message. The first percentage that shows is 25% (and the message reads "initiation of flux"). If the connection occurs as it should the progress will immediately jump to 50% ("reading of data"). The problem though is that, as of late, the connection to the servers has been stalling at 25% or 50% for hours on end, so I tend to just restart the application several times to get around whatever pathway issue it might be having. However, once the progress gets to 75% (the message reading "Authentication") it will proceed to connect after about five minutes, although why I am posting this in the first place is because it usually stalls at either 25% 50% or 75% instead of connecting.

If either account does end up connecting to their respective servers, after some twenty times of my shutting down and restarting Adium for example, all my contacts (or nearly all) read "distant server not found" (translations from French). At that point I just try to log out and log back in, which sometimes resolves the problem wherein the contacts are shown as they should be when connected to the servers, but trying for hours on end is not fun.

What I see in opening the Adium preferences pane in order to monitor the connection to the servers, is that the accounts seem to load in chunks of 25%, starting at 25%, then going up to 50% and then 75%; and after that nothing shows, which means it will usually connect after a few minutes. However, at this particular sitting, I have been trying to connect for over an hour.

I cannot find the pathway for Adium on my computer either, so I am not sure if there is a problem there, but if I uninstall the application and then reinstall it, all my information is saved nonetheless (passwords, contacts, everything) so the same problem arises (assuming that it's coming from my computer). - I do tend to get a lot of spam from unknown contacts and my Adium keeps all the messages I receive, so perhaps there is some overload for the servers in trying to load all the spam and what not for each account?

I don't know.

In the past, the same kind of problem arose several times where the SSL handshake could not be established. To counter the problem I changed my connection server (in the Adium preferences pane, under the options tab) by making sure that it was indeed the right connection server. I also tried changing the porte around and then back to its original number, 5222, and that seemed to do the trick. Under "resource" I have written "somewhere" as I don't like to share names from my actual computer with others, since that information is public. Perhaps that is the problem?

I use Mac 10.11.6 and windows 7, so it doesn't matter which OS you prefer, if you could please give me a hand I'd very much appreciate it! My hunch is that it is some problem with the pathway on my Mac, as I recently replaced the drive (about a year ago) with an SSD, and in transferring Adium over, perhaps the pathway got screwed up or something. However, if that were the case then Pidgen shouldn't run into any problems on Windows, and yet if I try to connect it also takes a long time or reads "handshake SSL" problems (if to paraphrase).